Better Off Dead (14 page)

The animal testing area made me the most
nervous of all. They weren't barbecuing bunnies or foisting mascara
infections on helpless puppies. But the walls of the room where I
was to monitor the preliminary stage experiment were lined with
cages of genetically bred laboratory mice, as were two
free-floating counters that dissected the room. Mice, mice
everywhere. They teemed and quivered in masses of white that
hovered at the edge of my eyesight no matter where I looked, like
amorphous ghosts wanting to break free. My job was to check the
electronic room monitor, which meticulously recorded room
temperature, humidity, light levels and air balance every fifteen
minutes—recording all but the type of music piping in over the
intercom (classical: the mice loved Vivaldi and scampered in time
to its beat). I scoured the electronic readouts for blips in the
artificial climate, alerted maintenance if something looked awry,
checked the automatic feeding tubes to make sure the little suckers
were getting fed, ambled through calling out "Bring out your dead!"
every visit and duly noted all untimely demises of said mice,
preserving each miniature corpse for further examination in a
refrigerator in one corner of the room. A cat's paradise.

It was not my first career choice, but it
enabled me to gain access to the basement on a daily basis. My
goal: to ferret out the confidential files of David Brookhouse's
drug trials, he'd said the testing was still in the healthy patient
stage, but I had visions of schizophrenics lurking in the bushes to
follow women home and I wanted to get a look at the names of the
participants anyway. Just in case Brookhouse was not our man.

My third day down in Miceland, I still had
not located the room with the drug trial paperwork. But I did run
into Lyman Carroll, the professor who was Brookhouse's rival’ He
was the colleague conducting the separate experiments involving the
mice. He was also the person who had been conducting the drug trial
until Brookhouse grabbed it out from under him.

Lyman Carroll could not have been more
different than David Brookhouse. He was average height, with
rapidly thinning brown hair, glasses, a pudgy face and a rounded
middle that made it plain he spent most of his time behind a desk.
He also had a disconcerting gaze, which he had turned on me full
force at the beginning of the week when I first introduced myself
and explained I was interested in taking care of his many mice for
him. He responded with a series of rapid-fire questions designed to
determine whether I was an airhead or not—useless, I felt, since
who can be an airhead and attend Duke University? But I went along
with him and defined the terms "humidity" and "temperature" and
"federal regulations" accurately enough to satisfy his curiosity.
He hired me, dismissed me with a wave of his hand, and then
returned to some paper he was working on at his computer.

At least he wasn't a total horn dog like
Brookhouse, I thought. At first.

This opinion was revised dramatically on
Thursday afternoon. I had just left the lab after tucking the mice
into bed, when I noticed Lyman Carroll emerging from the men's room
looking scrubbed and spiffy in a fresh pair of khakis and a neatly
laundered shirt. He was squirting breath freshener into his mouth
and smoothing what little hair he had back into place.

I smelled romance and dropped back, curious
to know whether his tastes ran to coeds, as was the case with
Brookhouse, or to men, for example, or maybe even to mice. I put
nothing past anyone. I've seen it all.

Carroll's taste ran to
grown women. I peeled away from him at the main entrance, and
noticed a gaunt, plain-looking woman with short black hair waiting
for him outside the psychology building. She had one of those faces
that percolates a perpetual scowl, like a fourth grade teacher with
gas, and her lips were turned down in a permanent frown that barely
twitched when Carroll approached her. But then they exchanged a
kiss that was hygienically unsound, and involved way too much
tongue-swapping from an observer's standpoint. That kind of stuff
always completely grosses me out. Unless it's me in the middle of
it, of course. He slipped an arm around her and they started to
stroll away when their
tête
–
à
–
tête
was
spoiled by the arrival of none other than David Brookhouse. What
unfolded was interesting indeed.

By then, I was standing in the bushes like a
good P.I., peeking over the top of a healthy hedge. I had a
gopher's-eye view of the entire incident. Brookhouse came out of
the building with a blond coed on his arm. She looked young enough
to be a freshman and certainly not old enough to know better. He
froze when he saw the other couple at the bottom of the steps.

Lyman Carroll looked up at his colleague and
turned his back abruptly. His lady friend was less discreet. Her
face froze as she took in Brookhouse and the young girl. Brookhouse
stopped in mid-stride to stare back at her. His eyes grew wide
behind his glasses. He'd seen something I had missed, because he
ducked just in time to avoid a large textbook that Carroll's
girlfriend lobbed at his head. It sailed over Brookhouse and
thudded against one of the main entrance doors, falling open. The
pages fluttered in the late afternoon breeze.

"What's the matter, Lyman?" Brookhouse
called out to his colleague. "Can't you control your
girlfriend?"

"Bastard," the woman in question spit back
at him. She reached down for her shoe—a sensible leather walking
style capable of putting quite a dent in anyone's forehead—and
Brookhouse wasted no time in surrendering the fight. He dragged his
startled coed down the steps and dashed toward the parking lot
before another missile was heaved his way.

The older woman glared after him for quite
some time as Carroll waited patiently for her to recover. After a
moment, she retrieved her book, checking the spine for permanent
damage. It seemed she was only into crippling professors, not
books. Then she rejoined Carroll and they walked more slowly down a
path that passed directly in front of my hedge.

"I hate that bastard," the woman said. "What
he's doing ought to be illegal. I should report him to the ethics
committee."

"Don't start, Candace," Carroll said
wearily. "They'll never believe you once they get a whiff of what
happened between the two of you."

"I'm not letting him get away with it," she
answered back angrily. "Maybe those stupid little coeds he screws
will go away quietly, but not me."

She stepped up her pace, forcing Carroll to
scurry after her like some overgrown quail.

And I, well, I crouched there amid the
greenery wondering if maybe that lady might not be a very good
person to talk to about David Brookhouse.

Bobby D. disagreed. "You can't risk it," he
said later that night, after I had suggested we liven things up by
interviewing the woman who had lobbed the book at Brookhouse.

We were gathered around the fireplace in
Helen's living room. It was the first fire of the season, and
everyone from Hugo down to Killer had been drawn to the hearth by
its irresistible light and woodsy smell. Killer was snoring softly
at Helen's feet, amid the buzz of voices. Only Helen's mother was
missing: she had staggered upstairs earlier to sink into dreams of
past glory, no doubt thanks to a couple of Fanny's special Mai
Tais.

"I'm not much closer to knowing him than
when I first started out," I complained. "I have to push
harder."

"She needs to talk to her," Helen agreed.
"The woman's name is Candace Goodnight. She's a professor of
anthropology. I knew her a little, but we stopped speaking when
she..." Helen paused. "... when she became David's girlfriend just
before his trial. She was there almost every day during the
proceedings, sitting behind him. I know she knows the truth. Or
senses it. If she hates him now and will talk, she could really
help us out."

It was the first time Helen had spoken since
Fanny's dinner of country-fried steak had been put before her
earlier, and we all listened in respectful silence. I had been a
little worried about Helen for the last few days. She'd seemed more
withdrawn than usual. Not even Weasel could draw her out during his
quick visits. Whatever enthusiasm she had dredged up at first had
drained quickly away. I feared old demons were back to haunt
her.

"Casey can't waltz up to this dame and ask
her about Brookhouse without blowing her cover," Bobby explained.
"It's too risky."

"You could go talk to her Bobby," I
suggested. "Say some student's parents had hired you to investigate
Brookhouse because of his relationship with their daughter."

Helen glanced at Bobby and looked quickly
away. Bobby, while a sweetheart where it counted, still looked and
dressed like a third-rate lounge lizard from the seventies, despite
Fanny's attempts to bring him into a new decade. He was currently
wearing a shimmery neon green shirt that clung to his massive chest
like polyester skin. The top three buttons were undone and a large
gold medallion nestled in the soft forest of his chest hair. A wide
belt had been cinched so tight atop his navy flared trousers that
Bobby's big belly was squeezed into a giant figure eight. And he
wore white shoes to match the belt.

In other words, Bobby was not exactly the
picture of academic respectability.

"It has to be Casey," Helen said softly.
"Candace Goodnight will only talk to a woman. And Casey's the only
one I trust."

If it had come from anyone else, Bobby would
have been offended. But Helen so seldom asked for anything that a
resigned silence followed her plea. A pine log snapped and popped
in the fireplace. Burly, sensing the weight that Helen's confidence
placed on my shoulders, reached for my hand and held it without
speaking. I was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of family, a
feeling of belonging so foreign to me that I blinked away
unexpected tears.

People are so strange, I thought. And I am
surely among them.

"She could always disguise herself," Weasel
suggested. "Even Casey could look respectable if she tried."

Burly laughed and I punched him on the
shoulder.

"William is right," Fanny agreed. She was
the only one who called Weasel by his real name. "Your lovely
friend Marcus can make you over. He seems to enjoy it so."

And so it was that, two days later, I found
myself dressed like a Junior League supplicant and on my way to see
one Candace Goodnight, professor of anthropology at Duke
University. It was a Saturday afternoon and most of the Research
Triangle was at one college football game or another. Marcus had
made me over in front of the television while his boyfriend rooted
on Carolina. Perhaps inspired by glimpses of the stadium crowd,
Marcus had outdone himself. I was unrecognizable. A brunette wig
tumbled to my shoulders. I was wearing a ridiculously starched
khaki shirt and a pink button-down blouse with a bright green
sweater tied around my neck. Plus I had these goofy quasi-loafer
type shoes on my feet that felt like they were maybe one step above
flip-flops. Marcus had wanted me to wear knee socks, but I'd put my
foot down, especially when I saw the gleam in Burly's eyes when he
heard this suggestion. I knew I'd never get out the front door with
knee socks intact.

Casey Jones, preppie P.I.

Someone kill me now.

Burly had found her address easily on the
Internet. I was surprised at where she lived. Candace Goodnight was
either underpaid or cheap as hell, since she lived in a small brick
house in a so-so neighborhood on the outskirts of a forgotten
shopping strip just off of I-85. Most Duke professors could afford
something a little more upscale.

I was in luck. The good professor was home.
I discovered her on her hands and knees in a small backyard
landscaped with perennials. When she saw me turning the corner of
her house, she sat back and stared. I guess she thought my outfit
was as dumb as I did.

"I don't see students over the weekend," she
warned me.

"I'm not a student," I explained, flashing
my fake P.I. license so quickly she never had time to read the
name. "I'm a private investigator. I've been hired to look into an
incident involving another professor at Duke. Someone you
know."

"And that would be?" she asked, accepting
the concept of a preppie P.I. without question. I guess as an
anthropologist, she'd seen it all, too.

"David Brookhouse."

"Aaahhh." Her comment hung in the air
between us. We stared at each other. "Do you always dress like
that?" she asked. "Or are you undercover?"

I glanced down at my outfit. "This is sort
of a... costume," I admitted.

"Thought so. You don't look like you feel at
home in that get-up."

Okay, so she was avoiding the real subject.
But her tone was friendly, and her gaze was frank, and I was
starting to like her. Anyone who lobs a book at David Brookhouse
can't be all bad.

"Does this mean you're willing to talk to me
about Brookhouse?" I asked. "Everything you say is confidential. I
won't reveal your name. Will you talk about him?"

She wiped her hands on the plain cotton
sundress she was wearing. "Only if you promise to strip him of all
respectability and send him to the gas chamber."

"I can try," I offered.

She smiled. "Want some ice tea?"

"Sure." I waited outside, since she didn't
ask me to come in, and eventually located a lawn chair behind a
gardenia bush and made myself comfortable. She returned with a
couple of glasses of the South's favorite elixir and sat on the
grass at my feet. Up close, she looked a lot better than she did at
a distance. She was approaching fifty and fine lines radiated from
the corners of her eyes, but her eyes sparkled with intelligence
and she spoke with such animation that the sharpness of her
features was transformed into elegance. Her mouth, while thin, was
very expressive, alternating between a sardonic smile and quick
frowns when the topic was David Brookhouse.